Welcome to Epicurious'"Cook Like a Diner"series, where we obsess about the simple, iconic, super-crunchy pleasures of diner food—and figure out how to make those classic dishes at home.
Diner dreams die hard when it's time for dessert. In a whoosh, there goes that cinema idyll of the perfect pie: the mile-high meringue, the as-American-as apple filling. Here comes the saccharine reality: gooey canned stuff, cardboard crusts, everything looking a bit long in the tooth. It's ironic in Morrissettian sense: something bad happening to you when you'd really rather something good happen. It's like 10,000 spoons when all you need is a decent banana cream. I’m embarrassed by how many times I’ve been taken in, only to stop eating after just a bite. There was that little restaurant somewhere in Utah, that diner in western Illinois. It always seemed like such a good idea.
What happened to the diner pie that anybody actually wanted to eat? Did it ever exist, outside ofTwin Peaks? (For the record, the real-life analogue of theTwin Peakspiehas received undermining praise:“actually pretty damn good for a diner.”) Pastry chef Paula Haney felt so nostalgic for good pie that she just went ahead and opened her own pie shop: Chicago’sHoosier Mama Pie Company, where I worked for a few years, rolling shells and peeling rhubarb. The shop bills its offerings as “that great piece of diner pie you’ve never had.”
The pie problem was analyzed in 2013 by Robert Sietsema, who sampled the stuff at 10 Manhattan diners, declaring the results “generally awful.” (The article is headlined“The Death of Pie.”) Sietsema thinks this reflects the decline of the diner itself, but also the fact that our tastes have changed as options have expanded: Once upon a time, pie (even crappy pie) might've nonetheless been the best thing available. Now we can just go elsewhere. And it probably doesn't help matters that most diners don't make their desserts in-house anymore.